Doesn't the new Nexus 7 have a Snapdragon SOC? So this development should be relevant to quite a few people, right?

I guess I'm a biased KDE user, but I prefer KDE apps in many or most instances. As another commenter noted, Gwenview is stable, fast, and reasonably powerful. As for photo-editing apps, most people may prefer Gimp, but I think Krita can hold a candle and even has a few features that Gimp doesn't (see this comparison).

Other examples of (in my opinion) superior KDE apps include Dolphin (vs Nautilus), Kate (vs Gedit), Kile (a LaTeX IDE, Gnome has nothing comparible), Kmail (vs Evolution), Okular (vs Evince), and K3B (vs Brasero).

There are definitely some Gnome apps that I find better as well, including Inkscape (vs. Karbon) and the newsgroup app you mentioned, Pan. I should add that not all of these are really "Gnome" apps, but they all use GTK.

The particular study that Rep. Grayson was referring to when he made these remarks claims that they "calculated approximately 44789 deaths among Americans aged 18 to 64 years in 2005 associated with lack of health insurance". The study goes on to say that this was in spite of things like free emergency room treatment and community health clinics.

I can confirm this; I also didn't have sound until I ran update-grub and rebooted.

This is only the latest in a long line of technical problems with Ares I, to say nothing of all the delays, cost overruns and other management issues.

First, they discovered an oscillation issue from the SRB that could cause damage to the upper stage and the orion capsule. Last year, they found out that with a slight wind gust, the vehicle might collide with its launch tower.

Incidentally, both of these problems and the current one are all related to the SRB. President Obama needs to do the right thing here and kill Ares I before it has the chance to kill anyone.

You're absolutely right that space travel is inherently dangerous and that shouldn't necessarily deter us from engaging in it despite the risks.

However, that shouldn't excuse the disaster-waiting-to-happen that is Ares I. Particularly when there are better, cheaper, and safer alternatives. In particular, a recently released study finds that EELVs would absolutely be a safe, cheap alternative to the Ares I.

We definitely need to take risks in space travel, but not stupid dangerous risks of strapping humans to SRBs that cannot be controlled or turned off in any way and have a history of failing spectacularly.

Sadly, this doesn't really surprise me; I've heard similar horror stories about Marshall. They share a large amount of the blame for both Space Shuttle disasters. For Challenger, I guess you could blame Thiokol (now ATK) for their "innovative" O-ring design and for their insistence that flaws discovered with this design early on were no big deal. You can also credit many of the engineers at Marshall for finding these problems unacceptable and protesting about them, but in the end, nothing was done to fix the problem and Marshall was responsible for oversight of the SRBs. With Columbia, again, there's blame to go around, but safety issues surrounding chunks of falling foam was Marshall's responsibility. And again, there were good engineers at Marshall who knew about this problem (actually, since STS-1 everybody knew about this problem, or at least should have known) and there were people who were very concerned about it and trying to get managers to address it, but in the end, again, nothing was done. I look forward to the day when shuttle is retired and I don't have to hold my breath every time the damn thing flies, although I'm beginning to believe Ares I is not an improvement. Why oh why can't we just put the Orion on a Delta IV Heavy and call it good. It seems to me it would be much safer AND we could save tons in NRE costs. Is it perhaps that NASA has to keep all their contractors happy and give companies like ATK a slice of the pie for their SRBs?

The real reason NASA is so sensitive in calling off launches due to potential lightning strikes is more likely Apollo 12, where a lightning strike almost caused the mission to fail.

But is a computer a luxury anymore? Or is it a necessity? Aren't computers (and other digital devices) steadily becoming cheaper? Isn't the ability to use computers and develop software becoming a necessity, even in developing countries?

Japan recovered quickly after the war in part because they had successful industries before the war. Around the same time, India was trying to emerge from a century-long yoke of colonial domination. You are correct about India's military budget, though.

We need to realize that the digital divide is an infrastructure issue every bit as much as roads, sanitation, and clean water are. To do this, we also need to start thinking about long-term solutions. The Japanese know this, too. For example, it seemed foolish to a lot of people back in the 1960's when Japan decided to build a super-high speed rail line (the Shinkansen). It seemed like a luxury, when most of the country was still moving around with bicycles. Today, however, they are reaping the rewards, and in places like California, we are only now starting to realize how beneficial such a transportation system would be to our economy.